Mark Zuckerberg is an American philanthropist and technology entrepreneur, Founder and CEO of Facebook (Meta), the world’s best and most popular social media platform. Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth of $128 billion USD. He is currently only 37 years old. Mark is the world’s fifth richest person. Mark is the youngest among the world’s top 100 wealthiest persons and the youngest among the top 30 by more than a decade.
EARLY LIFE
On May 14, 1984, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born in White Plains, New York. Zuckerberg began using computers and creating software in middle school. In the 1990s, his father taught him BASIC programming, and he later engaged software engineer David Newman as a private tutor. Mark attended Phillips Exeter Academy for his junior and senior years, where he excelled academically and received medals in physics, arithmetic, astronomy, and classical studies. He attended a graduate-level BASIC course at Mercy College while still in high school. He also created “ZuckNet,” a software programme that linked all of the computers in the Zuckerbergs’ house with those at his father’s dentistry clinic. It functioned similarly to AOL’s Instant Messenger, which debuted the same year as Mark’s ZuckNet. In high school, Zuckerberg created the Synapse Media Player, a music player. The media player figured out what the user liked to listen to. AOL attempted to acquire Synapse and recruit Zuckerberg. Microsoft also made a proposal for Synapse for several million dollars and attempted to employ Zuckerberg. In the autumn of 2002, he did not sell and enrolled at Harvard.
By the time he arrived at Harvard, Zuckerberg had earned a reputation as a programming genius. He studied psychology and computer science. In his sophomore year, Zuckerberg created the application CourseMatch. Users could make study groups and choose classes depending on the preferences of other students. He invented Facemash not long after, which allowed users to choose the best-looking individual from a set of images. The site flooded Harvard’s servers the first weekend it was up and running, forcing the institution to shut it down. On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg and his Harvard dormmates Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin established “Thefacebook,” which was originally located at thefacebook.com. In order to focus on Facebook, Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard in his second year. In 2017, he was awarded an honorary doctorate.
THE RISE OF FACEBOOK (META)
Initially, Facebook was solely available to Harvard students. Columbia University, New York University, Stanford, Dartmouth, Cornell, University of Pennsylvania, Brown, and Yale were among the first to adopt it. This is when the site’s popularity began to rise, and by 2010, it had reached 500 million members worldwide. The staff increased dramatically once the office moved from Harvard to California. Facebook is now the go-to place for individuals to keep up with their friends’ lives, as well as one of the most important news sources on the internet.
In early 2018, a data breach occurred, with Cambridge Analytica harvesting millions of Facebook users’ personal data without their knowledge, mostly for political advertising. This was the greatest known data breach in Facebook history, and Mark Zuckerberg was forced to go before Congress to guarantee that user data was safe in Facebook’s hands.
Over the last 15 years, Facebook has acquired 78 firms. On Aug. 23, 2005, the firm made its first big acquisition, purchasing the Facebook.com domain name for $200,000, officially replacing their previous domain, Thefacebook.com. Only 27 of the 78 firms that Facebook has purchased have had their expenses revealed to the public. The total value of these 27 transactions was estimated to be more than $23 billion. Some of the companies owned by Facebook (Meta) are Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus VR, com, LiveRail and Threadsy.
NET WORTH
Currently, Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth is 11,610 crores USD. The majority of Zuckerberg’s wealth comes from his 13% stake in Facebook of $115 billion. Facebook went public on May 18, 2012, at a price of $38 per share. Mark held 400 million Facebook shares. That implies that Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth on paper was about $15 billion at the time of the IPO.
Mark Zuckerberg’s annual salary is $1. That isn’t a typo. Many CEOs, including Zuckerberg, opt to pay themselves minimal wages in order to maximise the company’s revenues. When a firm optimises earnings, the overall value of its stock holdings rises, which is where the executive’s actual wealth is derived. Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin, for example, get paid only $1 per year!
Zuckerberg and Chan own roughly $200 million worth of real estate and land. Some of their most notable real estate assets include 700 acres in Hawaii, several homes in Palo Alto, and a townhouse in San Francisco. His net wealth exceeds Jordan’s, Nicaragua’s, and Jamaica’s total GDP.
Mark has pledged to give away 99 percent of his money. during his lifetime. He declared in September 2017 that he will sell off chunks of his stock on a regular basis to finance his charity, the CZI (Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative). The revenues from his 2018 stock transactions were $5.3 billion. He sold $1.86 billion worth of Facebook stock in 2019. The Harvard dropout has pledged most of his present and future riches to philanthropic causes as a member of the Giving Pledge and creator of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
LESSONS
- Mark advises people to be passionate about what they do. Be enthusiastic in what you do. Facebook has been able to develop consistently and conquer every challenge because of its passion. Even in the face of difficulty, our Facebook prodigy was able to reject plenty of buyout offers owing to his passion.
- Mark Zuckerberg has lived by the slogan “Think big, start small” his whole life, and it has served him well. Mark Zuckerberg has always put his sights on long-term goals, from humble origins to a massive enterprise. From the beginning, he had a clear vision. He turned down plenty of lucrative offers by firmly declaring that he is here to build something for the long-term. In addition to his unwavering commitment, he holds himself and his firm to high standards, and his work ethics reflect this. He is constantly striving to provide people with a better experience with innovations and cutting-edge features.
- He advises people to never stop learning. Facebook was founded as a result of a desire to learn new things. Mark Zuckerberg has had a fascination in computers and programming since he was a child. At the early age of 11, he even created a software named ZuckNet to connect his father’s home and workplace computers. He acquired a variety of languages while making games out of his friend’s artwork. The list might go on forever. Despite having reached the highest ranks in his field, he continues to enrol in courses to keep up with the newest technological developments.
In conclusion, Mark Zuckerberg, just at the age of nineteen, started the world’s most powerful social media site that has now become worth billions of dollars. He is one of the greatest tech geniuses that the world has ever known. Moreover, he is a philanthropist and believes in using technology for the betterment of human life.
